Anime Vice News

ROBOTECH: MACROSS SAGA #1 - - Special Review

Hiiiiighway to the danger zooooone...! Wait - -

For whatever reason, aerial combat hasn’t ever been that exciting to me.
I know some guys who are really into the stuff - - who worship
at the shrine of TOP GUN and knock back one X-WING novel after another - -
but I’ve never found it as interesting as, well, basically any other type of
sci-fi action. Mecha battles. Cyborg brawls. Outerspace gunfights. That’s what spins my wheels. A bunch of
spaceships flying around and dogfighting? Well, I’ve got to work myself up to
enjoy that.

So, as you can imagine… this was another case of me kind of just humoring
a show and respecting its context.

=

It is definitely interesting, at the least, to watch this knowing that
it was one of the earlier cases of an anime really crossing over in America.
The name “ROBOTECH” carries a lot of enduring cred for older comics fans and I
can totally see how this would’ve totally blown their minds in the 80’s. The
animation alone holds up so well, today - - how mind-blowing must it have
been back then? There’s also a certain level of quaintness, seeing an anime
from the earlier days of dubbing, when translation teams took more license with
the task of localization.

Those are all matters of appraisal, though - - not enjoyment, necessarily
- - and I’m not going to lie about how I needed to “power through” this single
episode. Maybe it simple came down to fighter planes just not being my thing, but
I was less appreciative of the all-too-familiar rookie hotshot and frazzled
superior relationship between the ace pilots here. I did think it was fun
gimmick to have the aliens leaving one colossal booby trap in the planet-sized debris
they discarded (and I suspect that was there due to dub team’s creative
license) - - but that’s really it.

At least I’ve gotten another, more favorable, piece to the MACROSS
puzzle to counterbalance the horror that was MACROSS II: THE MOVIE, right?

Back in the day when vcr was a thing people used to record tv,my brother used to record this for me in the morning when i was in grade school ( never understood why the station did that ) an i would come home an watch each one. Amazed at the animation quality.Used to pause it an slow mo it to watch the animation. Yes Transformers looked like non scotish crap next to Robotech.

Few mech anima have mechs that i like as much as Robotech. The designs still for the most part look doable.Wonder if some of them will make it into Mechwarror online... hmm must look into that.